My name is Saulius Šimčikas. I spent the last year on a career break and now I’m looking for new opportunities. Previously, I worked as an animal advocacy researcher at Rethink Priorities for four years. I also did some earning-to-give as a programmer, did some EA community building, and was a research intern at Animal Charity Evaluators. I love meditation and talking about emotions.
saulius
Karma: 6,415
I’m afraid I’m failing to connect the dots. How do you see this being related to veganism, and how do you see researching this making an impact?
Also, perhaps it’s a bit weird to use it as a benchmark because it’s the consumers who pay most of the cost for chicken welfare reforms (and, to a lesser extent, farmers, retailers, and sometimes governments). So the comparison with something like AMF is not very clean. Corporate campaigns are a bit more similar to lobbying governments to distribute bednets. Ugh, I notice that I’m a bit confused about this right now.
I’d say there’s about 30% probability I will do it in the next two years. I’ve just started a project for Open Philanthropy about estimating what should be the speed-up values in cost-effectiveness estimates for corporate and legislative welfare reforms, as that is the most uncertain aspect of these estimates. Open Philanthropy is the main target audience for this type of stuff and I don’t think that putting the rest of the numbers together for a cost-effectiveness estimate would influence them much. I’m unsure if another cost-effectiveness estimate is what’s needed to finally attract other large-scale donors to fund welfare reforms. People who care about cost-effectiveness have gotten the message I think. A new estimate would probably output a similar number because reforms have probably gotten less effective, but I now think that I underestimated cost-effectiveness in this report.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Some thoughts.
As long as we don’t have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.
Lobbying smaller bodies of government is definitely easier. Whoever decides on policies in small countries has fewer bids of attention and is targeted by fewer lobbyists. You might need a lot of connections and effort to make your voice heard to a decision-maker in a big body of government. In a small body of government, you might be able to set up a meeting by writing an email without any prior connection. There’s definitely a trade-off of scale vs tractability here. And to me, it’s not obvious at all which choice would be more cost-effecitve. I’m not talking from experience here, it’s just my common sense intuitions.
If we can get a successful model to work for some part of a large country, there is the potential to scale this much further or to have it scale automatically across the country (e.g. word of mouth).
I agree that country borders impact word of mouth but I’m not sure how much. Especially in Africa since I’ve heard that African borders were drawn kind of randomly and I don’t know how important they are culturally. For example, if I look at Africa language map like this, I see that bigger countries have many languages. Language barriers might limit the meme spread within the country. And it also seems that languages often cross national boundaries, Meme spread through internet content, TV, and radio might often transcend national boundaries, I imagine. But I don’t know how much, I know little about Africa.
It’s just food for thought, I think your view is reasonable and you probably have already thought about these things. You could just reduce the weight of the variable a little bit if I convinced you a little bit :)
I relate to that a lot, and I want to share how I resolved some of this tension. You currently allow your heart to only say “I want to reduce suffering and increase happiness” and then your brain takes over and optimizes, ignoring everything else your heart is saying. But it’s an arbitrary choice to only listen to the most abstract version of what the heart is saying. You could also allow your heart to be more specific like “I want to help all the animals!”, or even “I want to help this specific animal!” and then let your brain figure out the best way to do that. The way I see it, there is no objectively correct choice here. So I alternate on how specific I allow my heart to be.
In practice, it can look like splitting your donations between charities that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, and charities that seem most cost-effective when you coldly calculate, as advised in Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately. Here is an example of someone doing this. Unfortunately, it can be much more difficult to do this when you contribute with work rather than donations.
Also, it seems that EA forum gets about 14,000 views per day. So you spend about $2,000,000/(365*14,000) = $0.4 per view. That’s higher than I would expect.
Note that many of these views might not be productive. For me personally, most of the views are like “I open the frontpage automatically when I want to procrastinate, see that nothing is new & interesting or that I didn’t even want to use the forum, and then close it”. I also sometimes incessantly check if anyone commented or voted on my post or comment, and that sort of behaviour can drive up the view count.
Also, 4000 users is an underestimate since the majority of people benefit from the EA Forum while logged out (on LW about 10-20% of our traffic comes from logged-in users, my guess is the EA Forum is similar, but not confident), and even daily users are usually not logged in.
You posted this graph
If I understand it correctly, it shows that about 50% of EA forum traffic comes from logged-in users, not 10%-20%.
Invertebrate sentience table (introduced here) has “Self-administers analgesics” as one of the features potentially indicative of phenomenal consciousness. But it’s only filled for honey bees, chickens, and humans. I agree that more such experiments would be useful. It’s more directly tied to what we care about (qualia) than most experiments.
I think that animals might not eat painkillers until they are unconscious out of their survival instinct. There are substances that act as painkillers in nature, and the trait “eat it until you’re unconscious” would be selected against by natural selection. But if they would eat it until unconscious, that would provide good evidence that their lives are worse than non-existence.
One Tibetan lama encouraged me against thinking in terms of “should” or “ought”s, and that, instead, a better psychological framing for my day-to-day actions is “would like”
This is common advice:
In Nonviolent communication, they say that there is no right and wrong and that it’s better to reframe everything as needs.
In Radical Honesty, we do exercises to stop being led by “shoulds”. Instead of “shoulds”, we simply talk about our sensations in the body, what we feel, and what we want.
In CBT, they see “shoulds”, “musts”, “oughts” as cognitive distortions. They think that these rigid, absolutist self-demands lead to feelings of guilt and frustration and encourage reframing such statements to be more flexible.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages values-driven actions rather than actions taken out of obligation or avoidance of guilt[1]
The Replacing Guilt series also talks about replacing shoulds
I still understand what Peter Singer is getting at because I used to think in the same way, but that way doesn’t make sense to me anymore. I just don’t see what in the real world he is pointing at. E.g., I noticed that when I read Peter saying “If we cannot simply appeal to nature, how do we reach the judgment that we endorse compassion for those beings who are suffering, but we refuse to endorse hatred of outsiders?”, I was confused and had to reframe it into “Peter wants everyone to want to reduce suffering.” I think that means that I’m an anti-realist in meta-ethics, while Peter Singer is probably a realist.- ^
I don’t have much experience with CBT and no knowledge of ACT. I took these descriptions from GPT-4.
Hi. Thanks for sharing the model. I’d like to question you putting 32.5% weight on the scale, which you define as “Number of land animals projected to be farmed in 2050 under business-as-usual conditions”. The value of this variable depends on:
Current human population
Expected growth in the human population
Current animal production per capita
Expected change in the production per capita
I think that the 2, 3, and 4 are relevant and should be in the metric. But of these four, I’d bet it depends on the 1 (current human population) by far the most. No matter the growth, Djibouti (pop 1.1 million) will not farm more animals than Nigeria (pop 213 million). But I’m unsure if that provides evidence that the marginal dollar would go further in supporting animal advocacy in Nigeria.
Uh, I know embarrassingly little about the geopolitical situation in Africa. I’ll just say that I saw this type of metric being used to prioritise animal advocacy work in the U.S. over the work in Poland because U.S. is bigger. But federal legislation in the U.S. is very unlikely, so any work in the U.S. will focus on a particular state, which might be smaller than Poland. If that state somehow becomes an independent country (or EU becomes one country), suddenly the comparisons shift to favour Poland. But it’s unclear whether such administrative changes would actually impact how many animals would be helped by charities in either country.
There is an implicit assumption that we would achieve more if we spent $10 million on a big country like Nigeria, rather than if we dispersed this $10 million among 10 smaller countries which combined might be as big as Nigeria. It’s unclear whether this is the case even for country-wide interventions. It’s possible that lobbying bigger government bodies is more cost-effective. But is it? I just honestly don’t know. And also Nigeria likely has bigger corporations than Djibouti, and corporate campaigns against bigger corporations could be more cost-effective. But I haven’t seen this shown anywhere either. It’s also possible that campaigns against medium-sized corporations and governments are more cost-effective. AFAIK, we just don’t know. And for some other interventions, like working with farmers to achieve win-win reforms (in the style of Fish Welfare Initiative), it might not matter whether the farmer is in a big or small country.
Sorry for the longwinded comment, I didn’t want to spend much time tidying it up, and thanks for your work :)
Thanks so much for this work! I think it’s high quality and useful. Some thoughts:
I’m curious, why you are not also suggesting corporate campaigns against pet stores that sell feeder mice? Pet owners who shop there probably think of themselves as animal lovers so it might work. Is it because most feeder rodents are ordered online? Also, whether you campaign against pet stores or zoos, there might be a need to include third-party auditing in the commitment, just like it’s included in the Better Chicken Commitment. If campaigns against zoos or pet stores were successful and attracted public attention, perhaps even legislative changes would eventually be feasible.
There might be a market for higher welfare feeder rodents. I was told that my 2019 article on the issue that you mentioned was the 2nd most read on the Rethink Priorities website (that was years ago, probably no longer the case). I received multiple emails about it from non-EA snake owners, despite no outreach. This makes me think that some snake owners might care about feeder rodent welfare and might already feel some guilt about it. Unlike when dealing with processed meat used for food, snake owners have to deal with rodent carcasses, or even live mice, which might make it more difficult to ignore the fact that this was/is a sentient being.
Gosh, the stuff you observed during the breeder visit is just so cruel and sad
I wonder if a significant number of mice are also fed to other pets. E.g., this website claims “Frozen mice are suitable for a wide range of pets, most notably for snakes and other reptiles, as well as cats and birds of prey.”
If you get another chance to speak with feeder rodent industry professionals, I’d be interested in what they’d say is the average age of feeder mice and rats at slaughter. The scale of the problem depends on that quite a lot. The number of rodents killed per year might overstate the scale of the issue a bit because they seem to be slaughtered when they are just a few weeks old, or often even a few days old for pinkies.
Huh, I didn’t know that there was such a large-scale operation in Lithuania, which is where I’m from. I sent your article to someone who runs an animal advocacy org there.
It looks like you weren’t paid by anyone to write this. If that’s the case, I want to thank you even more. I’m amazed at how people in this community do stuff like that.
I understand and emphasise with you. The possibility of doom can cause paralysing fear. But it can also free us, shedding all pretense, awakening us to focus on what truly matters without wasting time, and reigniting the love for life. And the love of life seems like a better motivator for working on x-risks than the fear of death. Movies where characters rediscover life after a terminal diagnosis like Living (2022) and songs/poems like this (content warning: some nudity) inspire me to reframe the possibility of doom and death in this way.
I think that this already did a decent job, not sure there’s more to say
Feed costs usually constitute between 50% to 70% of the total livestock production costs. Reducing the costs of farming crops used for feed (like soybeans and corn) would likely make animal farming more efficient and hence increase the number of farmed animals.
I guess that increasing the efficiency of crops farmed directly for human consumption would barely impact the number of farmed animals. Maybe people would produce and consume more non-meat products because they are more profitable and/or cheaper. Hence, they might consume a bit fewer animal products. But maybe people would afford to buy more animal products because other food is cheaper. I guess that the former effect would be a bit higher but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Whether it’s net-positive would likely mostly depend on other factors that have little to do with the welfare of farmed animals in the short term. E.g., it might increase the human population a little bit.
I see. In that case, it might be good for someone else to do the project of determining what weights for your pain categories would be most reasonable, and perhaps you could review that. I’m now considering doing it but it’s unlikely that I will.
I see why you made your decisions, but I still think that it would be very useful if people could cite you to say stuff like “According to Welfare Footprint Project, broiler reforms decrease chicken suffering by very roughly 40%-60%”. It’s not for researchers at places like OpenPhil to decide what should be the next welfare ask. It’s for donors, volunteers, researchers who want to mention your conclusions in passing, and even retailers considering whether to sign the Better Chicken Commitment. I don’t know if animal charities would do it, but such a sentence could even be included in petitions urging retailers and restaurants to implement welfare reforms. Yes, it would be more accurate to write that according to your research, “broiler reforms increase annoying pain by 4.5% but decrease hurtful pain by….” But that is clunky and then the reader might be confused about whether the welfare reform are even good because there is more annoying pain. So it’s more difficult to make a point that these reforms are very impactful using your research. Hence, your great work is cited less and has less impact than it could have. And yes, you can’t accurately say whether the reform decreases suffering by 30% or 60% because it might depend on what weights for different categories of pain you will use. But I think that many people assume that it’s more like 5% so whatever you write on the subject, I think it would be useful.
Also, if you don’t do it well, someone else will do it poorly. I wrote sentences based on your research like “broiler reforms avert 50% of suffering” in this comment but I had to use my own weights for categories of pain. But your weights would be much better than mine because clearly you thought about it more. I think I later saw my weights being used in some serious cost-effectiveness estimate, but I don’t remember where.
Also, I want to say that I really appreciate and respect your work, thank you for doing it :)
Thanks for the post, it’s an interesting idea. I slightly worry about corruption in “unannounced animal welfare audits by accredited and independent third parties”. Someone told me years ago that such audits by government agents in Lithuania were a farce. Do you know if such audits work well in practice? One way I see it working is if the auditor is an animal advocate. Is that what tends to happen in practice?
TLDR: Former animal advocacy researcher and programmer looking for part-time or contractor work.
Skills & background: generalist research, cost-effectiveness estimates, knowledge about animal advocacy, programming. See my EA forum profile for work examples.
Location/remote: I live in London, can work in an office or remotely, somewhat open to relocating
Availability & type of work: part-time or contractor work. Might be open to a full-time job for an exceptionally good fit. Can start whenever.
Resume/CV/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saulius-%C5%A1im%C4%8Dikas-0867b4a6/
Email/contact: sauliussimcikas@gmail.com
Other notes: I’m interested in animal welfare or longtermist research and some roles in animal advocacy organisations like corporate campaigns manager. Open to other suggestions too if you think I’d be a good fit. Also, tell me if there are things you think I should research or do and I might try to get funding from elsewhere.
I’ll provide some quick thoughts in case no one else answers in a better way.
I don’t know anything about farming in Pakistan in particular, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t the same welfare issues as elsewhere. E.g., egg-laying hens are probably raised in cages which is very bad for them. So by being vegan, you would save tens or hundreds of animals per year from suffering in expectation. It’s particularly important for animal welfare to avoid eating chicken, eggs, some types of fish, and other small animals.
However, you could potentially help millions of animals by becoming an animal advocate. I don’t know about Pakistan in particular, but in most Asian countries animal advocacy movements are very small or non-existent and people who would start such movements and think about cost-effectiveness would be extremely valuable. I see there’s an article about it here.
Also, Our World in Data’s assessment you cite is about fossil emissions. It mostly depends on industries. It doesn’t include cow burps which are a big contributor to climate change. I don’t see much reason to think that choosing a vegan option for a meal in Pakistan would have less impact on climate change than doing it in a Western country. But this is not my area so I don’t know.
I see. My personal intuition is that it wouldn’t convince many people. I mean, cooked food includes cooked meat. So, unfortunately, their argument that we have evolved to have meat in our diets still stands.